


time's tide will smother you

by catinthedark



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Everyone holds very tight to everyone else, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 18:10:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2782685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catinthedark/pseuds/catinthedark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus is sad, and he’s tired and he is sore and bruised and battered and he is too drunk to be thinking any of the thoughts that keep floating, disjointed and strange, through his head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	time's tide will smother you

Remus is sad, and he’s tired and he is sore and bruised and battered and he is too drunk to be thinking any of the thoughts that keep floating, disjointed and strange, through his head. Sirius is out doing god knows what and it's probably dangerous, and he is alone in the flat. The bulb on the lamp’s blown out next to the sofa, leaving the room dark and illuminated only by the light of the just-waning moon.

Dumbledore has been looking drawn and tired lately, more so than usual. They aren't winning this war—and there's a joke, isn't there, this is hardly a war, there's no armies here, no glory in back alley skirmishes—they're not even really putting up much of a fight, but no one seems to be giving up. Remus has always known it of himself, but he is not as _good_ as his friends. He wants nothing more than to surrender, lie on this old sofa just here until the world is clear again.

He tries to take a swig out of the bottle, but somehow it is empty and somehow this seems like an insurmountable barrier. His arm flops back down on the seat next to him and he feels very much like he wants to die. Or, not quite, the want is not so active as all that, it’s more like the thought of continuing is too exhausting, but the feeling is a constant pressure against his skull now, an insistent drag into despondency and his body, ever the great betrayer, will not but insist he keep living. Remus breathes out, feels the weary sick spin of the world around him, puts the bottle on the floor next to him.

He drags his aching limbs from the sofa and cleans his teeth in front of the speckled dark mirror in the bathroom. His face stares back at him, all pale blue and dark shadows under the moonlight shining brightly through the window. This is not enough, he thinks. 

Remus pulls a blanket from the airing cupboard on the way back to the living room and lies under it on the sofa, waiting for the dawn and for Sirius’ return, and for the uncomfortable, heavy sleep that the liquor will bring.

&&& 

Both sleep and the breaking of the day arrive before Sirius crashes into the flat. Remus wakes to the stomp of his boots on the floorboards and the dry, rotting taste of a hangover in his mouth. He struggles into sitting position, and feels the swoop of nausea in his chest and stomach.

Sirius has a black eye and a split lip, ripped clothes and hair matted with dirt and blood.

“Oh, Sirius,” Remus says. “What on earth did you get yourself into?”

Sirius smirks and barks out a bitter laugh. “A whole fucking group of Death Eaters.” He plonks himself down next to Remus on the sofa. “What else?”

Remus reaches out a hand to run his fingers over Sirius’ bruised cheekbone. He feels ill. Sirius brings up his own hand to touch the back of Remus’ fingers.

“It’s not so bad,” says Sirius. “I’m alive, aren’t I?” He lets out another bitter laugh, softer this time, and looks up at Remus from behind the curtain of his hair. “McKinnon isn’t, anymore.”

He tries to smile, twisting up half his face, and Remus’ whole body feels suddenly like it’s filled with a poison that is only half his hangover. His fingers are still resting on Sirius’ face. “Oh,” he says, and he feels useless, and he stares at Sirius’ face for half a second and thinks his nose might be broken as well, and then he pulls Sirius close to him like if he holds on tight enough it will make any difference at all.

&&&

Time drags on and drags Remus with it, and he doesn’t leave the flat most days now, except sometimes to get tea and milk and cigarettes and loaves of sliced bread at the shop around the corner, and for Order meetings.

He doesn’t remember these weeks, when he’s able to look back on them; he barely remembers the days that have come just before, waiting and sleeping and listlessly staring at the pages of books he cannot for the life of him seem to get it together enough to read.

He is supposed to be researching, for the Order. Cursebreaking and Defence and the like. It isn’t as interesting as it sounds, and Remus thinks it is very hard not to feel a bit suicidal, doing this kind of research, confronted with all these rows of figures and words in tiny black script on yellowing paper. Or—it's hard not to feel a bit suicidal, but at least it's not the shattered-glass and heavy-metal-in-your-gut type.

It's familiar, the plain bored steady pulse-of-blood-through-your-veins kind of wanting to die, the kind that makes you think that lives and deaths in all their entirety could be pummeled flat and reduced to records of numbers of breaths taken and steps walked and tears cried, and maybe that wouldn't be so bad. He rests his chin on his hands and tries very hard to focus his eyes on the page.

This could be on one of these days, or all of them, but Sirius comes in later, and he runs a hand down Remus’ neck, very gentle, and Remus realises that he’s been staring at the same page for the last twenty six minutes, and he thinks he should be more surprised that he has lost focus so utterly but he is not at all. 

They heat up canned spaghetti for dinner, eat it in the half light at the kitchen table, a candle between them and the strangely domestic chaos of two lives all around them. They go to bed together, which Remus knows is the closest thing they have to a constant, the way their world stands, these days.

It is very tenuous, but they are here and they may not be soon, but, still the fact remains that they are here.

The days are very lonely.

He doesn’t remember what the weather is like.

James and Lily come over, another night, and Peter was invited but sends an owl in the morning with a scribbled note on a ripped scrap of parchment, S _omething’s come up, can’t make it_ and, _Another time, perhaps?_ Remus clears the kitchen table of his books and scraps, walks to the liquor store for some bottles of cheap wine, and Sirius cooks, some kind of French thing with potatoes that he got out of a book.

He watches Sirius in the kitchen most of the afternoon, stands upright for as long as he has all week—month, maybe year—and Lily laughs in delight when Sirius tells her it wasn’t Remus who made dinner and James claps him on the arm and says he’s been housebroken, finally.

Sirius swats him over the head. All of them laugh.

Lily only drinks water, and Remus thinks later he might have noticed this, if he hadn’t gotten halfway through the first bottle of wine himself before dinner. He only notices that she looks at him oddly, across the table, when Sirius is bringing out the food on whatever dishes they had managed to scrape together, a mismatched but passable dinner set, and she holds onto them both a bit longer when they all hug goodbye.

In any case, when he realises Remus thinks, _oh god_ , and tries very hard to remember their faces.

&&&

"I want to die," he tells Sirius one night.

They are sitting on the window ledge just outside the kitchen, Remus leaning on the frame and Sirius leaning into him, cold in the twilight air. They’re smoking the same cigarette, breathing in the air in the tiny gap between them and waiting for someone to make the first move.

He feels very unusually cold, in this moment next to Sirius' bulk and his heartbeat, and he has maybe drunk a little too much of the bottle of Firewhiskey Sirius had brought home. The words float peculiarly in his mouth, and he never used to be so maudlin when he was drunk but truly, he doesn’t see how exactly he’s could ever have been happy about feeling like he’s slipping halfway out of his body, and besides, this war is changing them all.

"Join the bloody club, mate," says Sirius. "But I don't reckon anything's much worth it if you don't, a bit."

Sirius takes a drag of the cigarette, and does not pull his head back at all as he exhales. The smoke unfurls through his lips, and Remus kisses him, almost just to have something to do, barely a dry touch of their lips together.

The smoke swirls between them, heavy and almost too hot on his tongue, and Sirius stubs the cigarette out on the windowsill, tosses it to the wind. He reaches up to smooth the hair behind one of Remus ears and cups the back of his head in his hands. He pulls Remus closer, very gently, and kisses him softly, stroking fingers through the hair at the base of his neck.

His face is blurry this close, and he is still very warm; it’s almost overwhelming. Remus can feel the tension behind the gentleness in his fingers, the restraint he is exercising in this moment.

Sirius pulls back from him, and everything about this feels very breakable, like that in this very second time is able to exist to infinity, but it is stretched thin like the surface of the water, and such suspension is only possible with extraordinary effort.

There are half healed cuts and fading bruises on Sirius' face, and now he is only a very little less pale than Remus is, but he is still very beautiful.

Remus exhales, leans back in, and the skin of tension breaks. Sirius pulls him in with more insistence this time, kisses him like it's a lifeline, still not roughly but with more urgency than before, more of the heat and the wanting.

“I love you,” Sirius whispers, and kisses him again. “I love you so much, you big fucking idiot, you have no idea.” He pulls back to look Remus in the eye, and runs his hands down the sides of Remus’ neck and over his shoulders, down his ribs to rest on his waist. Remus moves towards him, unsure of his next move, but Sirius holds him back.

“Inside,” he says, and manoeuvres his legs up over the windowsill and back into the kitchen, pulling Remus with him. “Come on.”

He looks to be on the very edge of falling into some kind of desperation.

This is the difference between him and Sirius, Remus thinks; Sirius still wants, still runs and fights and dances among the living, and Remus has forgotten how it feels to need like that, only thinks he wants to die because living holds just barely less appeal.

Sirius pulls Remus to the bedroom and lets him fall backwards onto the bed. Sirius straddles him, and his hair is messy and loose, and he yanks his shirt up over his head, and Remus almost remembers what it is to have a body, to have feeling. It is at the very edge of all of his senses, behind a translucent barrier his mind, where he can sense the forms of wanting but not its presence in his mind and body.

Still, the barriers are getting thinner, and he pushes himself up to kiss Sirius, clumsy and only half way on the mouth, but for now it is enough. For now, Remus lets himself be swept along in the waves of friction and movement and it’s hot enough this close to Sirius’ body that he does want to be closer, needs to be closer, and truly, this is enough for now.

When they are still, afterwards, Remus sees the pink in Sirius’ cheeks, and how bright his eyes are as he lies next to him, and he thinks, _I'd die for you_ , and traces a thumb along Sirius’ collarbone, down the tendons on his neck.

 _I’d die for you, and I’d be happy about it_.

Remus doesn’t understand the way his own mind works, anymore. It's all so inconsistent, even for him, and he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn't know if he wants to know what to do, or if anyone even can, so he hooks his chin over Sirius’ shoulder and draws him in tight to his body, holds on till he’s not conscious anymore.

&&&

But in the end, of course, _of course_ , and this is rather the point, isn’t it; in the end, it doesn’t matter much what Remus wants at all. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is proof that I have been listening to too much of The Smiths lately. I am very sorry about who I am as a person.


End file.
